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good article about why and how loved ones fall under Jones' (and his ilk's) spell
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Per his defense, when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones called the Sandy Hook parents crisis actors, “he was looking at the world through dirty glasses.” Maybe so. But he has built a career selling “dirty glasses” to people like my mother, a self-described “truther” who spread misinformation before and after the Sandy Hook shooting.
After a deployment in Desert Storm and through 30 years of odd jobs — including working a cash register and driving a paper route — my mother has found purpose and intellectual stimulation through her fervent following of Jones. Even as he backpedaled on the witness stand during his defamation trial in Texas and a jury ordered him to pay $50 million to the parents of a Sandy Hook victim for the lies he spread about the massacre, even as Jones faces another defamation case in Connecticut, she calls for a Nuremberg 2.0 to try the forces behind Covid-19 vaccines, which Jones’ site claims are a weapon of genocide.
In this respect, my mother isn’t unique: Millions of Americans continue to spread Jones’ misinformation even as he is publicly debunked. While it’s tempting to celebrate Jones’ being held accountable, we can’t forget the outsize place he continues to hold in the lives of millions like my mother...............
Four years had passed and I was living with my mother during the school year for the first time. We were at a stoplight in her 1971 Volkswagen van when an ad interrupting “The Alex Jones Radio Show” warned: “Time is getting shorter until Y2K. … Now is the time to stock up on emergency supplies and a whole food reserve.”
Jones’ influence over my mother in the last months of 1999 is hard to overstate. She took to calling grocery store trips “supply missions.” We pushed one buggy each through H-E-B until they were filled with canned food, toilet paper and industrial packs of Q-Tips. I knew to wander off when she asked a teenage grocery store worker for help finding toothpaste without fluoride. I knew I couldn’t bear to see his polite reaction when she whispered, “They want to make us easier to control.”
When Jones’ predictions of a government takeover via Y2K intensified, my mother broke the lease on her apartment to move us into a small cabin in the country. We stacked our “supplies” in half-boxes in the middle of the cabin’s single room, between the kitchenette and the bunk bed where I slept.
The night of New Year’s Eve, we sat around a campfire with a clear view of Austin’s downtown, and I didn’t plan to move. I wanted to see it for myself — the moment all the lights of the city would go dark.
Jones’ voice barreled through a battery-operated radio: “A Pennsylvania nuclear plant has been shut down.” I caught myself bouncing, giddy in the camp chair. Through the campfire smoke, I saw my mother. Her hair was pulled back in a bandanna. “Military are highly visible now,“ the broadcast continued. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there are trains of military equipment moving into Austin.“
As we listened, I asked, “What will the military do if the lights go out from the Y2K bug?” Without turning her head to look at me, she said: “Whatever they’re told to do. It’s the government we’re worried about.” I was worried, but not about the government. I prayed that Jones’ predictions would come true because I’d have to confront the seedlings of doubt I had about my mother’s decisions if they didn’t. To believe in her, I needed to see tanks in the streets.
When midnight came and tanks didn’t, any blind trust I had in my mother evaporated. When school let out, I moved back to West Virginia and spent the rest of my school-age years between my parents’ places. By high school, I laughed with friends as we flipped through the “Bloodlines of the Illuminati” book my mother kept in her living room. She was kooky and harmless, we thought. The ideas were a joke.
But her beliefs had become threatening by the time of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. We were no longer laughing. When I found out about the shooting, I was 22 and in my first semester as a high school math teacher, minutes into a freshman algebra class. My students’ teenage pretense fell away, and through their vulnerability, they seemed closer to elementary schoolers than to the college students they imitated.
After a long week, I called my mother. Our estrangement ebbed and flowed then — in this period, we spoke every few months, tiptoeing across a minefield of conversations to avoid. When I said I was glad my school had metal detectors, I shouldn’t have been surprised when she interrupted me to say, “Please, this was not some random attack.”
I could not — cannot — argue with my mother. I stayed silent.
“You’re telling me you believe that kid just bought a gun and shot up a school?” she asked, indignant. “He did all that on his own? This,” she assured me, “CIA is behind this.”...........
That’s really insightful and a good read. It isn’t hard to see that though - the need for people to have an order and a sense to things because it is somehow easier than to accept that a child could shoot up a school or a pandemic can occur naturally.
The problem is that replacing reality with this delusion because it’s more “orderly” comes with enemies and targets. The tragic or hopeless is replaced with design and manufactured evil. And those are powerful feelings - they can motivate the person to do irrational or even violent things.
How is that a better result than reality? It’s much worse.
